


Interdimensional Birthday Blues

by goodoldfashioned



Category: Gorilla Interrupted (2003), RedLetterMedia RPF
Genre: Birthdays, Blow Jobs, M/M, Reunions, Rough Sex, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-13
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:26:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26451076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodoldfashioned/pseuds/goodoldfashioned
Summary: Now a successful but lonely laser scientist, Dex only wants one thing for his 40th birthday, but getting it would involve time travel.So it's a good thing he invented a time travel machine for just such an occasion.
Relationships: Sid/Dex (Gorilla Interrupted)
Comments: 42
Kudos: 69





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I actually have a longer Mike/Jay time travel fic draft going but I wanted to post something today to ~mark the occasion so here's this insane idea I had this morning, second chapter coming soon! <3
> 
> *

By noon on his fortieth birthday, Dex’s determination to have a positive attitude about the whole thing was fading fast. 

He’d awakened with a sense of imprecise dread, but that was nothing new. There was a pandemic going on and he hadn’t left his penthouse apartment in months. Being rich enough to entirely self isolate and employ people to leave replenished supplies in his sterile foyer while he hid in the master bedroom was a colder comfort than he might have imagined back when he was poor, and what really stung was his growing realization that his current state of paranoid hypervigilance and profound loneliness wasn’t so different from how he’d been conducting his life in the past ten years anyway. 

Professional and financial success early in life had been a double edged sword. After revolutionizing the field of laser technology while he was still in grad school, the world opened for him like a poisonous flower. Most people who interacted with him wanted something from him. Usually it was money, or more direct theft of his ideas and innovations, in the worst cases. He wasn’t exactly free from trust issues even prior to this experience, thanks to his father, and by the time he turned thirty he was suspicious of anyone who was nice to him. He had plenty of sources to place the blame for this circumstance of his development, and one of them was his old neighbor Sid, who’d stolen Dex’s first ever would-be girlfriend only to then dump her and claim he was just trying to prove a point that unfortunately had already been proven between Dex and Julie in private, unbeknownst to Sid, though it was possible Julie had told him, though she claimed she hadn’t-- 

Dex shook himself out of this train of thought and opened the bottle of extremely expensive champagne he’d purchased for the purpose of celebrating his birthday alone. It was only five minutes after noon, but why not start drinking? He had nothing else to do today or really for the foreseeable future, and drinking might stop him from spending the afternoon wallowing in old Sid memories. 

He hadn’t spoken to Sid since he was twenty-two and had no idea what had become of him. Google searches yielded nothing, and Dex was too prideful to do something as pathetic as hiring a private detective to solve the mystery. Sid was very possibly dead. Dex was still Facebook friends with Julie and had not received a birthday greeting from her on there this year. He should really deactivate Facebook, he thought, standing at the floor to ceiling windows in his spacious living room and staring miserably out at the orange-tinted, smoke-clogged landscape while he sipped champagne. He never should have moved to California. He never should have done so many things, and he was increasingly afraid that one of those things he shouldn’t have done was cutting that asshole Sid and his massively satisfying cock out of his life in response to Sid’s point-proving move on Julie.

Dex groaned, finished his glass of champagne and poured himself another. He was going to end up wallowing in regrets and what-ifs all day. There was no avoiding it. Drinking would possibly make it worse, but he just gulped more down. Birthdays tended to bring this kind of bitter reflection especially close to the surface of his cluttered, anxious mind. 

His history with Sid was murky and weird and still sent goosebumps of something like excitement across his arms and shivers down the backs of his legs when he remembered certain nights they’d spent together. Not that they had often shared a bed. Usually their semi-violent hookups happened in Dex’s basement, or Sid’s, or in the alley between their houses if they were particularly impatient. Dex would tell himself it was something he was doing for Sid, to placate him, or out of curiosity because he was bored, but by the time he was twenty-two he’d only ever been with Sid, until his brief and humiliating attempts with Julie. Then Sid blew that up to prove that he could, or because he was jealous, and Dex left town for grad school, never looking back. 

Except that he did look back, all the time, in his mind. He thought about Sid’s sharky grin and that awful fake English accent he’d started doing toward the end of high school that everyone thought was some kind of response to trauma but which Dex knew was just Sid being a dick and trying to make himself seem interesting. Women had always liked him. Dex had always resented Sid while also considering him his best friend and wanting to impress him probably more than he’d wanted anything back then, other than the ability to finally move out of his father’s house, which would mean moving away from Sid’s house and out of his life, since most of their interactions were a matter of convenience, at least for Sid. Which was maybe one reason why it took Dex so long to get out of there, though he didn’t want to think about that. 

Because it wasn’t like he’d been in love with Sid back then! Except for the times when he kind of was, but he always regretted and reevaluated those. Sid was mean. Dex had issues with men. Thanks, Dad! Whatever, whatever. It was ancient history. 

He had a third glass of champagne and paced around the penthouse, trying not to think about the device in his guest bedroom and what it might be used for. 

The device had been tested on objects and lab rats, and all had returned from the past safely with no signs of damage. It hadn’t been tested on a human yet. Dex wasn’t ready to share it with the world. In fact, he’d built it largely for personal, recreational purposes. He didn’t trust humanity with time travel technology, and wondered if some other, similarly brilliant and wary scientists had invented devices like his before and had kept them hidden from the world, because why wouldn’t they?

He put his champagne glass down and went into his spa-like master bathroom to splash water on his face and try to get a hold of himself. He dried his cheeks with a hand towel and blinked at himself in the bathroom mirror over the sink, trying to imagine what Sid-back-then would think of Dex now. He’d fixed his teeth as soon as he could afford it and had gotten Lasik surgery so he could ditch the glasses. For a while there he’d been arguably hot, if still small, at least according to people on Grindr who he’d been too chicken to actually meet up with. He still looked a lot better than he had back when Sid knew him, though less youthful lately. He’d gained a little weight and hadn’t had his hair cut since February, but he looked pretty good like this, or at least he thought so, maybe? It was hard for him to tell. He’d never really shed the insecurity he’d had growing up, even in his mid-thirties, when people at laser science conventions were regularly passing him their hotel room keys after his presentations. 

He practiced a few poses in the mirror, imagining the shock on Sid’s face if Dex were to use the device and show up in the past looking like this. Would Sid even recognize him? Would he even be glad to see his old fuck buddy, boy-next-door, nerdy best friend?

Dex was feeling reckless when he returned to his living room, and he knew drinking more champagne wouldn’t sate this feeling of shaky, building energy. He wanted to break something the way he used to with Sid, when they’d get giddy with a mutually destructive whim and trash some old junk in Sid’s backyard with his dad’s sledgehammer, then set it on fire. Sid was a maniac and Dex was kind of afraid of him, but that had been the fun of it, especially when they were older and Sid was suddenly like, why don’t you suck my dick, dork. It had seemed like he meant it as a dare, so Dex got on his knees and did it. The great shock of his life had not been Sid asking him for a blow job, or realizing he was brave enough to actually do it, or even loving it as much as he had, which was so much. The most shocking part of all that had been afterward, when Sid yanked him up by his skinny arms and pulled him into his lap to kiss him the way people kissed each other in movies, breathing hard and using his teeth on Dex’s swollen lips, looking so astonished and impressed that his eyes were fucking sparkling with some kind of wonder when Dex pulled back to push his foggy glasses back into place and give Sid a sheepish grin like: yeah, I’m _that_ good at this, apparently. 

Now he was thinking about the fucking kiss! One of only a dozen or so, the first one-- Fuck. He walked toward the guest bedroom, where he always left the door closed and locked. Even his cleaning service didn’t go in there, back when they were still allowed inside at all. 

Dex licked his lips and stared at the door, which would open if he entered a code he had memorized. This guest bedroom was really his lab, and the device was in there waiting, covered with a sheet. 

What would he even wear if he went back in time and confronted Sid in the past? Not a Star Trek shirt and lab coat with jeans rolled up into cuffs. Would he try to look hot? Would that be pathetic? He paced some more and thought about it, his mouth watering at the thought of Sid’s perfect cock. He missed it, which was so deranged. None of his other hookups, of which there had only been a cautious handful, had come anywhere close to making him feel like Sid had when he was on his knees, or on his hands and knees, or held tight in Sid’s lap with his legs wrapped around Sid’s waist, ankles hooked together behind Sid’s back. Sid had always been so warm, always sort of burning up under Dex’s hands. Of course other human bodies Dex had interacted with had had the same relative temperature, of course he was just imagining things, but then again maybe he wasn’t.

Maybe he should go back and do a sort of experiment, to find out, he thought. Gather data, make observations, that sort of thing. It would be for science, mostly.

He went to his walk-in closet, breathing a little harder than necessary as he pawed through his t-shirts, wondering which one he would wear if he was dumb enough to use the device. He was already wearing his best jeans, which made his ass look more squeezable than it really was. Just thinking about Sid’s massive hands closing around his bare ass cheeks back in the day and clenching hard enough to leave bruises made him sway on his feet a little. He’d really done it now: he was too horny to make rational decisions. He’d neglected his sexual health to a disastrous degree.

He could barely deny that he’d begun work on the device years ago with the fantasy of using it to go back in time and be with Sid again in mind, even if at the time it had seemed like a sick joke. Now the device worked-- Maybe, probably. Now he was going to find out. 

The thrill of selecting a shirt to wear on a trip back through time reminded him of all the crazy shit Sid had roped him into back in the day. It was like that old energy was already closing around him, making him feel like not such a forever alone sad sack but like somebody who could get away with all kinds of things if he had the right partner in crime. 

The shirt he picked was an old one that used to hang on him like a tent. Now it fit near perfectly, clinging to his not-quite-trim but relatively fit chest. It had a faded screen-print image of Leatherface from _Texas Chainsaw Massacre_ on the front, his chainsaw raised over his head with both hands. It was Sid’s shirt, once. Dex stole it from him and had never dared to wear it where Sid might see, knowing he would have taken it back. It didn’t smell like him anymore.

It’s my birthday, Dex imagined saying, if Sid were to laugh and call him pathetic for any or all of this: being forty years old, building a time machine, using it this way, still having this old shirt. Maybe Sid wouldn’t remember the shirt was ever his-- But, no, he would, because in the past he’d only lost it recently, to Dex’s thieving, post-fuck hands. Be nice to me, Dex might say, knowing that Sid wouldn’t be. It’s my birthday.

He went to the guest bedroom, his makeshift lab, and entered the code to unlock the door. Standing there at the threshold and peering inside without putting on the lights, he eyed the shape of the device in the back corner, hidden under its bedsheet. Was he really doing this? He had known he would eventually, if he was honest with himself, but maybe this particular birthday was bad timing. Then again, something about the day felt like a last chance moment, like a window that would pass if he didn’t jump through it now, while he still could, while everything that was burning was still in the distance, visible and thick in the air but not at his doorstep yet.

“Okay,” he said, flipping on the lights in his lab. “Computer, begin recording. Commencing first human test of the matter through time and space displacement device.” 

His voice-activated command brought the machines built into the walls to life. He crossed the room to the device and pulled the sheet away with a flourish. It was sort of beautiful, just big enough to contain a person of smallish stature like himself. He’d designed it to look like a cross between a rocket ship and a time capsule, sleek and shiny with a red velvet cushion on the seat inside. 

He made some adjustments and ignored his racing heart and sweaty palms. Dumb, he was finally really so dumb! But also smart enough to pull this off, maybe. 

“Oh god,” Dex said, to the recording computer, after he’d entered the data points for time and place. His hand shook as he reached for the lever that would activate the device, and he looked at the open door across the room that lead back out to the rest of his penthouse, almost expecting to see himself standing there-- But not himself as he was now. He was looking for the skinny kid with glasses and the fat pink lips that tended to part and show his teeth even when he wasn’t talking, even after he’d tried to train himself to always press them shut. 

That kid was not here anymore, nobody was, so he flipped the lever and left. 

*

Waking up in his father’s house was the first of several shocks, even as Dex sat up in the old twin bed where he’d programmed his time-displaced body to land and reminded himself that he’d picked a date when his father was definitely not home. He blinked at the old Weird Al poster on the wall across from his childhood bed and instinctively reached up to push his glasses back against the bridge of his nose, but they weren’t there. He’d arrived in the past still in his forty-year-old body, as planned.

He catapulted out of the bed and steadied himself on jelly legs before going over to the junk-cluttered dresser across the room and peering at himself in the attached mirror, wide-eyed. He’d arrived intact, looking just like he had back in his penthouse apartment. The air in the house smelled funny, sort of stale and faintly of fried bacon. When he crossed the room and opened the window over the bed, another familiar smell made him grin like an idiot: cigarette smoke, coming from the alley between his house and Sid’s. 

“Hey, dummy!” Dex called out, staying out of sight and trying to make his voice extra squeaky, less grown up. “Quit stinking up my yard!”

“Fuck off!” Sid said, not bothering to use the fake British accent, which usually meant he was in a shitty mood. 

Dex covered his mouth with both hands to keep from laughing hysterically in relief and terror. It had worked! He was here. Now he just had to convince Sid that he wasn’t some creep but his old pal Dex, who had actually missed Sid a lot, so much so that his nipples were hard under his t-shirt just from the sound of Sid telling him to fuck off, though he probably wouldn’t admit that right away. 

Walking through the house was surreal, and once-familiar smells assaulted him nonstop on his way toward the side door in the kitchen that lead to the alley where Sid was smoking. Dex braced himself for Sid’s reaction and took a deep breath before reaching for the doorknob. His hand shook when he turned the knob. He wasn’t sure what to expect. Would he get down on his knees out there in the alley and blow Sid like a slut? Would Sid flick ashes in his face and tell him to get lost, that he looked old and sad and nothing like the skinny nerd Sid had used for sex? Would they kiss? 

Dex told himself to stop being a coward, which was itself like traveling back through time, because that refrain had often come to mind when he was preparing to spend time with Sid. He never knew what he was going to get. Once, while Dex was seemingly asleep, Sid had even stroked his hair. Thinking of this and using the memory for courage, Dex stepped outside. 

Sid didn’t even look up. He was glowering at the ground, leaning against Dex’s house, just under his bedroom window, chain smoking by the looks of the crushed butts littering the weedy grass near his feet. The ugly green dye in his hair was halfway grown out, spiked up haphazardly, and he was wearing his usual ripped leather jacket with the spikes on the shoulders, plaid checked pants and a dirty-looking white t-shirt, combat boots. He was better looking that Dex remembered, which should have been impossible, because Dex had pretty rosy memories of how Sid had hovered over him and pinned him down and what it had been like to stare up at Sid in awe and come in his pants, sometimes, just for the feeling of being roughly groped by him. 

Dex went completely still, waiting for Sid to look at him. He felt like he couldn’t breathe, like something in his chest would snap if he exhaled. The air outside smelled so familiar and clean that it felt too sacred to inhale. 

“I thought you were out of town,” Sid said, and he turned, finally, to see who he was talking to.

Dex put his shoulders back and tried to stand up straight, making himself as tall as he could. Sid looked annoyed at first. He opened his mouth, probably to ask who the fuck this old guy was, staring at him. Then his mouth fell open a bit wider and a broken little croaking sound came from the back of his throat, which made Dex laugh, because he’d only ever heard Sid make that sound when he was coming. 

“Ey,” Sid said, the color draining from his face as he lifted a shaking hand to point at Dex. “That’s my shirt.”

“Yeah.” Dex felt himself fidgeting dorkily in place in his old way and made himself stand still and straight-backed again. “I took it.” 

“What the fuck did you _do_?” Sid asked, walking closer and gesturing to Dex with his cigarette. His English accent had halfway returned, maybe as a defense mechanism. “D’you invent an aging ray and shoot yourself with it, or-- Is that-- You?”

“It’s me,” Dex said. He couldn’t help grinning at the expression on Sid’s face. Sid looked like he might puke, but not in disgust, his eyes scanning down toward Dex’s knees and back up to his face over and over, like if he looked enough times this would make sense, or the neighbor boy would go back to normal. “I’m from the future!” Dex blurted when Sid just boggled at him, speechless. “It’s terrible there,” he added, though he’d had vague plans not to reveal anything.

“What’d you do with my Dex?” Sid asked.

Dex’s eyebrows shot up. He was shocked, also touched, that Sid cared.

“Nothing,” Dex said. “He’s in Maine with his dad. I picked this weekend so we wouldn’t run into each other. Didn’t want to, uh. Freak him out. Or rupture space and time, you know.”

“This is fucked,” Sid said. He took a long drag from his cigarette and narrowed his eyes at Dex as he exhaled through his nose. “So. You little shit. You invented a time machine, huh?”

“You don’t seem that surprised.”

“Why would I be? It’s just the kind of thing you’d do. Why the fuck’d you come back here, though? You here to warn me about something?”

“Not really.” Dex shuffled in place, wanting to walk closer to Sid but not wanting to startle him. Sid was keeping his distance, standing about six feet away, which was actually pretty funny, though Sid wouldn't understand why and Dex wasn’t going to try to explain. “I just, uhh. I wanted to test it out. I thought this would be a good start.” 

“What the hell’s up with your hair?” Sid asked, inching a little closer. “And, your-- Beard, jesus. Did you invent hair-growing potion, too?”

“No.” Dex rolled his eyes. He couldn’t stop grinning like an idiot. “I just aged.”

“How old are you?”

“Forty! Today, actually. I mean, in the future--”

“Fuckin-- _What_?” Sid laughed and moved closer, still squinting like he was trying to make sense of the puzzle that was Dex. “Well fuck me sideways, you little shit. It-- Really is you.”

“Of course it’s me!”

“What the fuck are you doing here, mate?”

“I told you, it’s an experiment.” 

Dex flushed and looked up at the sky. It was a normal blue color, no clouds. He’d forgotten how much he’d loved it when Sid called him _mate_ in that stupid accent, and also just how big and pretty Sid’s eyes were. 

“I can’t deal with this shit,” Sid said, but he only leaned against the house again, closer to Dex now, and smoked. “You and your fucking-- Experiments. Jesus. What are you like in the future, anyway? Other than--” Sid gave him a sideways glance. He almost looked nervous. “Uhh,” he said, and didn’t clarify. 

“I’m a laser scientist,” Dex said, leaning beside him. “A rather famous one.”

Sid rolled his eyes. “Of course,” he muttered. “So I guess you’re some rich big wig?”

“Yes, actually.” 

Sid looked at Dex again, his cigarette held just in front of his lips as he studied him. 

“Did you marry Julie?” Sid asked, sneering. “Or some bimbo twenty years younger--”

“I didn’t marry anyone, actually. Julie married an accountant, she has two kids. She’s also an accountant.”

“That’s fuckin’ depressing. So what happened to me?”

Dex shrugged. He wasn’t sure if he should bring up the fact that in a couple of weeks Sid was going to sleep with Julie to prove his point and that Dex would never talk to him again, until now. 

“I don’t know,” Dex said, toeing the dirt. Everything about this place was bringing back his old mannerisms, or maybe he’d never really lost them. “Me and you lost touch pretty soon after this day, actually.”

“We-- What? Seriously?”

“Yeah. Believe it or not, you do something assholish and I get mad and finally leave for grad school.”

Sid scoffed. The color had come back to his face. In fact, he looked a little flushed. 

“I’m probably dead,” Sid said, and he smirked when he glanced over to check Dex’s reaction.

Dex felt something twist in his chest. He was afraid to find out, in the future. It might be true.

“Better dead than forty,” Sid said, doing the accent again and leering at Dex. “Jesus, though. You don’t look that bad. I guess time was kind to you. Go figure.” 

“I’m not sure it was,” Dex said, figuring he had nothing to lose. “I’m pretty lonely.” 

“Rich and hot and still lonely? God, of course you are.”

“You think I’m hot?” Dex said, beaming and inching a little closer, so that his shoulder almost touched the spikes on Sid’s jacket.

“Well-- Comparatively!” Sid pushed off the wall and threw his cigarette down, stomped on it.

“Compared to what?” Dex asked, following him when he tried to move away. “Back then-- You’d crawl through my bedroom window at night and tell me you needed some ass.”

“So?” Sid said, glowering at him. His face was definitely red now. Dex couldn’t remember Sid ever blushing, back then. 

“So, you could have gotten other asses.” Dex snickered when he heard what he’d said. “But you kept coming back for mine. So you must not have found me completely ugly.”

Sid snorted and pushed his hair back with his fingers, making it stand up even more wildly. 

“The hell do you care?” he asked, walking closer. He still towered over Dex, broad shouldered and tall, and he smelled dirty in the best way, like tobacco and sweat, unwashed leather. “D’you come all the way back here to tell me I was the love of your life or some shit?”

“No,” Dex said, earnestly. Though he feared it was true, he certainly hadn’t come here to say so. “I thought, uh. For old time’s sake. Maybe you’d let me suck you off. It’s my birthday, and, um, well. You remember how much I always loved it.” 

“It?” Sid’s smile came slowly and felt like a threat. “You mean my cock?”

“Well-- Geez, yeah. To put it crudely.” 

“I’m being crude? You just came here from the future to ask me to fuck your mouth.”

Dex snickered and brought his hand up to cover his teeth, though they weren’t bad anymore. It was a habit he’d kept in the future, too. 

“I just wanted to treat myself on my birthday,” Dex said, shrugging like it was no big deal.

“Your breath smells like booze,” Sid said. He was crowding in closer, his dark eyes locked on Dex’s. 

“Champagne,” Dex said, feeling his voice pinch up the way it used to when Sid started to bear down on him and Dex was left waiting, wanting him. 

“This is fucking crazy,” Sid said, touching Dex’s hair. He held it between his fingers and examined it, rubbing his thumb over the silky strands. “You look-- But. It’s you, but-- You’re so--”

“It’s called aging. Happens to all of us.”

“Oh, so you didn’t invent a cure for that, huh?”

“Nope.”

For a moment they just stared at each other, both breathing a little heavily. Dex wanted to bury his face against Sid’s chest and breathe in the smell of him, feeling dizzy with arousal already. Sid’s bottom lip was a little chapped and rough-looking, and he had bags under his eyes as usual, as if he hadn’t slept in days. Everything about him was exactly what Dex wanted, what he’d come for, and he felt newly small under the shadow of Sid’s body, like he always had. 

“God, you’re the same,” Sid said, abandoning the English accent. He took hold of Dex’s jaw and turned his face this way and that, dragging his fingertips roughly through Dex’s beard. “And you took my shirt,” he said, grabbing a handful of the front of it with his other hand. 

“Yeah,” Dex said, heart slamming. “What are you gonna do about it?”

“I guess we both know what you want me to do about it.”

Dex shrugged and chewed his bottom lip. He looked down at Sid’s chest and then up into his eyes again. They had that burning quality Dex remembered well, like Sid could transfer the heat of his body into Dex’s just by looking at him. Dex would prefer a more direct approach, like Sid’s hot come shooting down his throat. 

“So you’re still a little horn dog, huh?” Sid said, his smirk slowly returning. He let go of Dex’s jaw, still holding him by the front of his shirt, and brought his hand down to tease over one of Dex’s peaked nipples through the fabric.

“Ah,” Dex said, because oh god it had been a while since anyone touched him at all, actually.

“Have you still got the tightest ass in the midwest?” Sid asked, pulling Dex off the wall he’d been leaning on and toward his own house. 

“Um,” Dex said. He’d never been good at dirty talk. Sid always just did his thing, and Dex whimpered pathetically in responsive gratitude. “Maybe? You can investigate, if you want.” 

“Hang on.” Sid stopped in his tracks and turned back to Dex, who he was still dragging by the front of the shirt Dex had stolen from him. Dex swallowed heavily at the look Sid gave him, which was penetrating in a way that made Dex start to get hard in jeans. “You said you were experimenting-- You invented a fuckin’ time machine and _this_ was the first place you went?”

“Well-- Yeah, but--”

“Jesus christ, mate.”

“I thought it would be safe--”

“You wanted to some cock.” Sid grinned and reached down to palm himself through his pants, thrusting his hips forward and sticking out his tongue. “Well, birthday boy. You’re about to get some.”

“Yes,” was all Dex could say, idiotically, as he let Sid pull him in through the door that lead to the basement where he’d taken Dex’s virginity while gory horror movie and metal band posters looked on. 

Dex felt like it was about to happen all over again, like he was still a skinny, trembling mess in Sid’s iron grip, helpless to resist the fate he’d cast himself into.

He stumbled over his own feet in his eagerness to go where Sid was taking him, couldn’t fucking wait. 

*


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is gonna be 3 chapters now, lol. 
> 
> ALSO [check out this amazing art](https://anon-ee.tumblr.com/post/629547874704867328/sid-meets-2020-dex-inspiration-interdimensional) for the last chapter asfiajdsfoid thank you again anon-ee for this, I adore it completely and seeing this when I logged in to update was the best surprise :3 !!
> 
> *

Being back in Sid’s basement made Dex giddy in a way that he tried to downplay, though he did allow himself to wander around grinning at all the little details he’d remembered or forgotten while Sid got them some beers from the fridge upstairs. Dex recalled every peeling poster with specificity, also the precise shape of the watermarks on the ceiling that he’d stared up at with a kind of buzzed astonishment the few times Sid had fallen asleep on top of him here after sex. He’d forgotten how disgusting the carpet was. Like Dex, Sid lived with his father, just the two of them in a house that was indifferently maintained at best. Sid fought with his father, too, but differently. They were like peers, sometimes drinking out back together and sometimes at each other’s throats. Sid’s mother lived in Canada, or so he’d always said. Dex’s mother had been dead for so long that he only had a handful of vague memories of her. 

He felt overexposed and impatient for Sid to return, and peered uncertainly into the aquarium where a single turtle named Razorclaw lived. The turtle’s environment was the cleanest spot in Sid’s household, another thing Dex remembered accurately. It was occurring to him not for the first time that he could have used the time machine to go back and talk to his mother as an adult, but he probably would have just frightened her and wasted the trip. There was no scaring Sid, for better or worse, and of all the people in Dex’s past, perversely, Sid was the one Dex had known best and missed most. 

“All I got is this cheap swill,” Sid said, thundering down the stairs with three beer cans hugged to his chest. “Guess your tastes are probably all refined now, huh? Champagne and shit.” 

“I don’t drink anything very often,” Dex said, turning from the aquarium. He wanted to ask who the third beer was for, though he knew: for Sid, after he finished his first one. 

“Still a stick up the ass goody goody, then?” Sid said. He smirked and held the beer Dex reached for up over his head. “No,” he said. “You can have this after, to wash down my load.”

Dex sniffed and turned away. He was doing this all wrong. Half the idea of coming back now, successful and older and no longer rail thin or buck-toothed, was to turn the tables on Sid and finally be the cooler, darker one, who knew things Sid didn’t. He was slipping too easily back into his outmatched old self, here. 

“Should I just take my dick out or what?” Sid asked, eying Dex like he thought there might be some catch to this arrangement. He was keeping back, letting Dex roam around freely rather than crowding him like he used to, like he had when they were still outside.

“Did you expect me to take you to dinner first?” Dex asked. 

He grinned at the resulting expression on Sid’s face: surprise, then annoyance that hardened in his eyes like a warning.

“You could afford it,” Sid said. “Allegedly. Why should I believe you’re some rich hotshot in the future? You’re wearing a stolen shirt and fuckin’ Converse.” 

“Just ‘cause I have money doesn’t meant I’m going to spend it on clothes.” 

“And you never got married, huh?” 

“Nope.”

Sid sneered and walked a little closer. He’d put the two unopened beers on a table near the sagging sofa and was drinking from the other, kind of frantically. He’d never wanted a drink before sex in the past, and it was possible he was getting nervous, now that they were closed up in the basement together. 

“Does that mean you’re a reckless slut in the future?” Sid asked. He scoffed as if the idea was ridiculous. “Or did you have to use your time machine to get some dick because you still have no game?”

“Game?” Dex laughed in Sid’s face as he loomed closer. “We don’t call it that anymore,” he said, though he wasn’t really sure. 

“That’s not what I was asking about.” Sid gulped from the beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. His mouth was wet. Dex wanted a kiss, but he kept still and stayed in place, letting Sid come to him. “Do you get fucked a lot in the future?” Sid asked. 

“No,” Dex said. There was no reason not to be honest, as long as he didn’t let his confidence falter again. 

“How come? Did I ruin you for all other men with my monster cock?”

Dex rolled his eyes, though the truth was: yeah, kinda. 

“Is there weird sex shit in the future?” Sid asked, apparently not wanting an answer for his previous question. “Like. Virtual reality sex?”

“Nah,” Dex said. “At least, not that I know of.”

“Right, ‘cause you’re a prude.”

“No! I bet there’s at least one thing you’ve never done that I have. Everybody in the future loves it now. You’ll probably think it’s weird and too extreme.”

Sid scoffed. Dex could smell his beery breath and again fought the urge to come up onto his toes for a kiss. 

“Not bloody likely,” Sid said, back to the accent. 

“Well, you never did it to me back in the day,” Dex said, feeling smug and like he was gaining a little ground here. “And now it’s, like, my favorite thing.” 

“What is it?”

“Um. Maybe I’ll blow you first, then show you. Wouldn’t want to scare you off with my, uh. Futuristic sex mastery.” 

“Oh I’m so _fucking_ sure,” Sid said, but he was grinning, same as Dex, then laughing with him, too. 

“It’s weird how it feels like I was here just yesterday,” Dex said, and he turned to look at the room again, needing to snap out of the swoon that Sid’s lit-up eyes had almost pulled him into. “With you.”

“You were, bitch! At least-- The old you was. I mean-- The young you.” Sid gulped down the last of his beer, crushed the can in his fist and tossed it aside. “So,” he said, reaching for the button on the front of his pants. He thumbed at it but didn't pull it open. “Gonna get on your knees for this, or will that be too hard on your old man joints?”

“I’m in better shape now that I was back then,” Dex said, though he wasn’t sure this was strictly true. He crossed his arms over his chest so Sid would notice his biceps.

“That so? Why don’t you prove it.” 

“Sit down,” Dex said, grabbing for Sid’s arms. Sid startled a little but let Dex guide him backward, toward the couch, and when his legs hit it he sat and stared up at Dex, looking lost and very young for a moment, his hands on his knees. “Take off the jacket,” Dex said, wondering how many orders he could get away with. 

“Give me back my shirt,” Sid countered, his lip rising. 

Dex sighed. He was a little softer than he’d like to be, but he wanted to show Sid that he didn’t have a caved-in chest anymore. Though maybe Sid had liked that. He seemed interested now, anyway, and watched with widened eyes as Dex peeled his shirt off and handed it to him. 

Instead of taking the shirt from him, Sid shrugged his leather jacket off, as if to reward Dex for doing what he’d asked. His arms still made Dex want to use his teeth on that pale skin: just enough muscle to lift Dex off the floor without any effort, at least back when Dex was skinny. 

“You got chest hair,” Sid said, staring. 

“I always had some!”

“Some-- Barely, ha. Hmm.” Sid fidgeted in place and licked his lips before looking up at Dex’s face. “What are you waiting for?” he asked. “Get down here.”

Dex sank to his knees, glad not to have his squishy chest so prominently on display. He settled between Sid’s legs and put his hands on Sid’s thighs, struggling not to moan when he could feel the heat of him through the fabric. Sid was just like Dex remembered: overly warm in a way that made Dex want to squirm closer and get under his clothes. 

“When’s the last time you had some dick?” Sid asked, palming his growing erection while Dex watched, open-mouthed. 

“Time,” Dex said, blinking. “It’s so-- It doesn’t matter.” 

“Sure, whatever you say.” Sid spread his legs and leaned back onto the couch cushions, folding his hands behind his head. Dex could see the shape of his nipples through his thin t-shirt. He was breathing a little hard. “Go for it,” he said, knocking his knee against Dex’s side.

“You always made the first move,” Dex said, not sure if he was smug or sad about being asked to do it now. “Back then.”

Sid gave an angry little shrug, like he didn’t like having this pointed out. 

“What’d you do to your teeth?” he asked. 

“Uhh, fixed them?” 

“Huh. How am I supposed to make the first move, exactly? Want me to grab you by your golden locks and shove in or what?”

“No! Just. Never mind.”

Dex pushed his too-long hair back realized with an uncomfortable flush of heat that he’d been waiting for a kiss or something, as if Sid had ever started out with kissing. Sometimes they’d finished with one, but it always felt more like a reward than a seduction. Dex wanted a kiss because he’d missed Sid more than he’d even realized before settling in between the heat of his long legs, but he couldn’t expect Sid to feel the same. Sid had seen him just yesterday. His thighs were shaking a little against Dex’s sides, probably because he was freaked out by both recognizing the dweeb who was kneeling for him and also suddenly seeing him as a stranger, too. 

“Have you been blown by strange men before?” Dex asked, kneading his hands into the insides of Sid’s thighs. 

“Nobody stranger than you, dork.” 

Dex doubted that was true, or maybe it just wasn’t true yet. After leaving for grad school, he’d never stopped wondering who Sid ran to for sex in his absence. Strangers, probably. Or maybe he found some new twig of a person who got off on being tossed around by him. 

“God,” Dex said, when he settled his hand over the hard, hot shape of Sid’s dick and saw his shoulders flinch a little. “You okay?”

“‘Course I’m fuckin’ okay, except I’m not getting my dick sucked, for some reason!”

Dex could see now how thin Sid’s veneer of control over him had always been. Sid had counted on Dex to want him so bad that he got brainless. Dex still did, maybe more than ever, but now he could understand at the same time that he could just get up and leave Sid wanting, that there would be no real consequences. After all, he’d done it: he left, was gone. Sid had relied on him and had probably been grateful every time they were together, which Dex had somehow never considered before. He’d always had some mysterious power over Sid, too. 

“Take it out for me,” Dex said, shifting back a little. “Want to see if it’s as big as I remember.”

Sid smirked and seemed to calm down a little, his shoulders relaxing against the couch as he opened the top button on his pants. The pants were a uniform for him as much as the jacket, and they smelled like cigarette smoke, spilled beer, and Sid’s skin. He was always hot to the touch but almost never sweaty. Dex had forgotten that part. He’d been fascinated by Sid’s physiology, and by how it had felt to be close to someone who kept a lot of himself out of reach while also trusting Dex to hold his cock in his mouth, between those feral teeth. Even back then Dex had known, without thinking about it too specifically, that he wouldn’t be that close to many other people in the future, no matter how his life turned out. 

“So?” Sid said, pulling his dick out and stroking himself for Dex’s observant stare. He was rock hard, massive, his slouchy upper body in perfect contrast behind his ramrod straight pornstar dick. “Big as you remember or what, mate?”

“Bigger,” Dex said, earnestly, and he wrinkled his nose when Sid laughed. Dex smiled, unable to help himself. Sid used to call him a cockslut. It had always felt like an endearment, like praise for being as nasty as Sid wanted him to be.

“Can it still fit?” Sid asked, tapping the head of his cock against the corner of Dex’s lips, making him moan and lean in for more. “Hmm? With your chompers realigned?”

“My-- Chompers?” 

Dex snickered and felt the heat on his face creeping down his throat. He was hard in his jeans, squirming, thinking already about letting Sid fuck him like he used to. 

“Yeah, your-- Look, you used to be the only guy who could deep throat me. Why you would ever fuck with that miracle of a mouth, I dunno.” 

Dex snorted and gave Sid’s cock a long lick to shut him up, also because he couldn’t wait any longer to taste him. They both moaned, and Dex let his eyes flutter shut as he licked Sid again, not even intending to tease him so much as he wanted to savor the salty reality of him and take his time. The device would snap him back to the future like a rubber band that had been stretched out to its limit in nine and a half hours, if his calculations were correct. It already seemed like way too brief a window to enjoy this.

“Fuck yeah,” Sid said, his voice a low murmur when Dex leaned up onto his knees to take him in properly. “Nothin’ changes, huh? Look at you. Still fuckin’, _unh_. Hungry for it.”

Dex huffed what might have been a laugh if his mouth wasn’t stuffed full of Sid’s thick cock. The corners of his lips ached from the stretch, and it felt so fucking good. Sid was right. Dex was starved for it, beyond anything he’d even allowed himself to acknowledge before he came back here to take what felt like it used to belong to him, sorta. 

“God, mate,” Sid said, and then his big hand was in Dex’s hair. He seemed fascinated by it, stroking and tugging, dragging his fingers through it. “Little-- Ah, god, yeah-- Little _slut_ , nothin’ could keep you off that dick for long, huh?”

Dex moaned around Sid’s dick at the thought of how long he’d kept away from it, actually. He’d sucked other dicks, even big ones, but nothing had ever felt like this. It was the sensation of having escaped the hell of his house next door for something dirty and shameless, also for feeling someone as big and mean as Sid melt for him, for this, because Dex was so good at it, good enough to earn more hair stroking. 

Dex was good at lots of things. Lots of academic, scientific pursuits, anyway. But nothing made him feel as proud of himself as this, somehow. And it wasn’t just any big dick he wanted to be a pro at sucking. It was Sid’s, still, and every time Sid pulled his hair Dex’s mouth got wetter. He pressed down until he was choking on Sid’s fat cockhead, and shivered all over at the low growl this pulled out of Sid. His hips had started to twitch upward under Dex’s clasping grip. He wanted more, wanted to fuck Dex’s face. Dex could feel it like a tremble that moved through Sid, against his palms. 

“What a fuh, fucking day,” Sid said, sounding close and pulling Dex’s hair hard, keeping his head down where he wanted it. “You-- You shoulda come around when my Dex was still here-- _Fuck_. Coulda had both of you sucking on that dick at once, ah--”

Sid made a high, panicked noise at the back of his throat, lifted his hips and came, possibly for the thought of two Dexes sucking him off. 

“Jesus,” Sid said when Dex pulled back after swallowing it all down, licking his lips. Sid breathed out heavily through his nose and pushed his hair back with his fingers. “S’not the same without your glasses getting all fogged up,” he said, mumbling and staring down at Dex from under heavy eyelids. “Guess you got your eyes fixed, too?”

“Uh-huh,” Dex said, crawling up onto the couch and into Sid’s lap. He felt almost too big at first, but Sid was still bigger, and when his hands went to Dex’s waist he squeezed like he wanted Dex there. Dex straddled Sid’s thighs and hovered his face over Sid’s, studying his eyes. Sid was still hazy with pleasure, his head tipped back onto the couch cushions and an almost-smile tugging just at the corner of his lips. He always got like this after he came, and sometimes it could last for hours, if Dex handled him just right. 

“You still get hard for it, huh?” Sid said, letting Dex know he could feel the erection that was straining against the front of Dex’s jeans, poking Sid’s belly. 

“Would I have come all this way if I didn’t?”

Sid snickered and ran his hands over Dex’s bare back, then across his shoulders. He dragged his knuckles through the blond fuzz on Dex’s chest, making him shiver. Dex’s nipples were hard, and he wanted Sid to bite them like he used to, but wasn’t quite shameless enough to ask, at least not yet. 

“That’s always blown my mind,” Sid said, staring at the center of Dex’s chest. “How wound up you get just from sucking some dick.”

“I wonder if you’ll ever find anyone who likes it as much as I do,” Dex said without thinking. 

“Yeah.” Sid flicked his gaze up to meet Dex’s, the haze of contentment clearing from his eyes. “Guess I’ll have to shop around, huh? ‘Cause you’re ditching me soon, or so you claim.”

“Yep.” 

“‘Cause of something I’m gonna do?”

“Uh-huh.” 

“Gonna give me any more info about that?”

“Nope.” 

Dex leaned forward to wrap his arms around Sid’s neck, pressing his naked chest to the heat of Sid’s body. Even through Sid’s t-shirt, he was so warm. Dex held him tighter, waiting to be wrenched off. Sid’s hands had gone tense on his waist. 

“Not even a bloody hint?” Sid asked. The stupid accent was back.

“What do you care?” Dex asked, sitting back with a scowl. “You were always telling me it was pathetic that I didn’t leave town. Asking me what I was hanging around for.” 

“‘Cause you were living with that shithead.” Sid flicked his head in the direction of Dex’s father’s house. “Sometimes I think you’re only fucking around with me so I’ll murder him for you.” 

Dex’s eyebrows shot up.

“Really?”

“I-- I don’t fucking know, forget it. Hey. What’s this future sex thing you like? Now you gotta tell me.”

“You’re gonna be way too chicken to do it,” Dex said, grinning.

“Bullshit! What is it, like-- Painful?”

“Uh, no.”

“What, then? Spill it!”

Sid flipped Dex onto his back and loomed over him on all fours, trying to make his expression threatening. Dex just laughed and rubbed up against him, feeling high. Maybe he was still a little champagne drunk. Would he be horrified by all this later? Possibly, including what he was about to try to explain. He just so wanted be the one who introduced Sid to a sex act for a change, to turn the tables and be the more experienced one. 

“It’s very intimate,” Dex said. “Which is part of the reason you’ll be too afraid to do it.”

“Fuck you, what? Intimate, like-- Huh?”

“You’re gonna be scandalized,” Dex said, still laughing. 

“Starting to think you’re just winding me up, mate.” 

“Well, _mate_ ,” Dex said, mocking him. He sat up on his elbows and bumped his nose against Sid’s. “Kiss me first,” he said, lowering his gaze to avoid Sid’s angry stare. “‘Cause. After, if you do this thing, if you’re not too much of a wimp-- You won’t want to kiss me.”

“Who says I want to now?” Sid muttered, but then he was pressing Dex down to the couch with the force of his kiss, dragging his sharp teeth across Dex’s bottom lip. 

Dex moaned into Sid’s slick, open mouth, because he was a slut for this, too. He wrapped his arms around Sid’s neck, legs around Sid’s back. Sid kissed like he had a point to prove, aggressively maintaining control and plunging his tongue deep into Dex’s mouth. It was very possible they hadn’t kissed in months, in Sid’s timeline. Sid’s approach to affection was stingy and random, or maybe he’d always been waiting for Dex to ask for a kiss, because apparently he thought Dex might consider him a convenient road to patricide and little else. 

“Now,” Sid said when he pulled back, leaving Dex breathless and so hard underneath him. “Your big, fancy, future sex move. Tell me. I ain’t afraid of no-- Fucking.” 

Dex snorted at the bad joke and resisted the impulse to just launch himself up for more kissing. He chewed his lip and debated how to phrase this.

“It’s ass eating,” he said, blushing again. 

Sid looked puzzled. 

“Ass-- Like--?”

“Like your mouth on my ass. Uh-huh.” 

“That’s what you think I’m gonna be too chicken to try?” 

Sid scoffed and sat back. He looked not quite nervous but a little queasy and concerned. Dex laughed helplessly at his expression, covering his mouth with both hands. 

“You don’t have to,” Dex said. “But, um. I’m very clean!”

“Eugh,” Sid said, pulling a face. “It’s not like-- It’s not like I’ve never _heard_ of this, you dork.” 

“Heard of is one thing. You never tried it on me, so. I figured you never tried it at all.” 

“Smart ass,” Sid said, pinching the chub at Dex’s side. He smirked when Dex whined and squirmed underneath him. “Do you have a fat little ass now?” Sid asked, sliding his hands down to frame the fly of Dex’s jeans, where his boner was obvious. “You used to be so scrawny.” 

“My ass is new and improved,” Dex said, watching Sid pull his pants open. “See for yourself.”

“You’ve got a real smart mouth these days, huh?” Sid said. He didn’t look upset about it, was almost smiling. “Took you long enough to learn how to talk back.”

“I talked back plenty. I called you an asshole all the time!” 

“Yeah, sure, but not when I had you on your back, between my legs. Then it was all stammering and _please_ and oh, god, Sid!”

“I don’t sound like that! Or-- I didn’t--”

Sid kissed him again, pressing a menacing laugh to his mouth before shutting him up with hot swipes of his tongue. Dex sighed and deflated, his hands sneaking up under Sid’s t-shirt to stroke his sides while they kissed. They’d rarely kept such a languid pace when they fooled around, but these were special circumstances, and Dex didn’t feel as skittish as he had back then, afraid to get caught. 

“You want me to shove my tongue up your ass, huh?” Sid said when he pulled back just far enough to murmur this into Dex’s face like a threat, his eyes dark. “Sicko.” 

“It’s not sick! Not if you’re hygienic about it. It’s practically standard foreplay in the future.” 

“Oh, bull _shit_.” 

“Fine, well, I knew it. You’re so quaint with your early 2000s mindset, it’s just way too hardcore for you--”

“Bitch, get your pants off. There’s nothing I won’t do to that ass and you know it.”

Dex grinned and rolled onto his stomach, squirming out of his pants. Sid helped by yanking them down roughly. His big, impatient hands were suddenly everywhere, making Dex drool onto the couch cushions. He almost regretted asking for this, because it would mean no more kissing. But it was probably best to end the kissing hours before he had to leave, because being yanked away from this was gonna hurt bad enough as it was. 

“Oh yeah,” Sid said, stripping Dex’s underwear off once he had his shoes and socks off, too, leaving him completely naked and writhing under Sid’s gaze, lying on his front and rutting against the cushions. “Mhmm,” Sid said, squeezing the entirety of Dex’s left ass cheek into one hand. “Got a bit of cushion back here now, eh? Nice.”

“You idiot,” Dex said, as if he wasn’t beaming against the couch. “Quit stalling.”

“Stalling!” 

Sid smacked Dex hard on the ass and cackled when he yelped. 

“Can you still take it rough in your old age?” Sid asked, drumming on Dex’s ass cheeks with both hands and less force. 

“Try it and find out,” Dex said, which was more or less what he used to say back when he was young. He’d always wanted to show Sid he was tougher than he looked, and it was so satisfying every time it proved true. Sid would sit back and stare at him with real wonder before lighting a post-coital cigarette and maybe dragging Dex over for a hot, messy kiss. 

“Oh, I’m about to try it all right,” Sid said, and Dex gasped when he felt Sid pulling his ass cheeks apart. “Get ready to have your mind fuckin’ blown.”

Dex couldn’t come up with any smart ass remarks, too overcome with the anticipation of finally having this for the first time in years, and from Sid of all people. He’d had to bite his hand to keep from screaming in ecstasy the first time someone had tried it on him, and he’d thought of Sid even then, maybe because he’d never had a first that wasn’t with him before, or because Sid had loved to remark on his hyper-sensitive ass back in the day. 

“Damn, Dexter,” Sid said, stroking between his ass cheeks with calloused fingertips. Dex moaned and lifted his hips to beg for more, not objecting to the use of his full name the way he used to. Now it was almost sweet, and it had been so long since anyone dared to call him that. “Still tiny, I see,” Sid muttered, sounding kind of choked up about it. 

“Please?” Dex said, soft, his voice muffled against the couch cushion. 

Sid hesitated. He seemed to be marshalling his courage.

“I guess eating ass is pretty punk,” he said, apparently needing to hype himself up for this.

“Only the fearless eat ass,” Dex said, which got him another hard slap on his ass cheek. He whined a little at the sting, then gasped when he felt Sid’s hot breath against his hole, then his tongue.

Dex didn’t hold back with his noises. He could feel Sid get bolder for every moan and whimper, until Sid was moaning a little, too, and making filthy slurping sounds that had Dex close to coming just from chafing his dick against the couch cushions while Sid ate him out. It was so animalistic and gross and he was only realizing now that he’d always loved it because it made him think of and long for Sid, and for how into it with abandon Sid would have been. Dex loved being right. He was trembling from his ankles to his shoulders and soaked in sweat when Sid finally let up long enough to smack his ass again. 

“Okay, future man,” Sid said, rolling Dex onto his back and smirking down at his overfull, blood red dick. “Tell me that wasn’t the best you’ve ever had.” 

“Please fuck me,” Dex said, having gone to the brainless place he’d missed so bad, where only Sid had ever brought him. He reached behind his knees and pulled his legs up against his chest, throbbing in all his sensitive places and feeling way too empty inside. “Please?”

Sid looked sort of stricken for a moment, like the sight of Dex being this desperate after so long without him wasn’t as hot as it was pathetic. Then he winked and groped for the bottle of lube he kept hidden in the couch cushions for just this sort of occasion. 

Even the smell of the cheap lube made Dex feel like he might burst into nostalgic tears. He blinked up at the watermark on the ceiling over the couch and tried to hold himself together. What had been so great about coming here and getting mercilessly railed, anyway? It was like a ritual, like a head-clearing, like home in a way that the house next door wasn’t. 

“Need me to work you open with something that’s not my tongue?” Sid asked, shucking his t-shirt off. 

“No,” Dex said. “I can’t wait any longer, just put it in.” 

“Spoken like a true cockslut,” Sid said. Maybe it came out harsher than he’d intended, because as he was shoving his pants off, staring down at Dex, he said, “ _My_ cockslut, that is. Fuck, look at you. You look good like this.”

“With my ass pointed at you?” Dex asked, squeezing the backs of his knees as he held his legs open. 

“Mhm, yeah, and--” Sid sighed and launched himself back onto Dex, making him flinch and remember what it was like to be young and to be jumped on, literally. Sid leaned up over Dex on all fours while he slicked his cock, peering down into Dex’s eyes. “This whole, you know,” he said, looking kind of lost again. “The hot laser scientist thing. With the hair, and the-- This.”

Sid touched Dex’s beard with his clean hand.

“It’s like you’re a man now or something,” he said. He started to go for a kiss, then maybe remembered where his mouth had been and backed off, exhaling through his nose. “I don’t believe you, by the way,” he muttered.

“Believe me-- What? That I’m me? From the future?”

“No, jesus, I’d know you anywhere. I’d know you as a fuckin’ mummified corpse. I meant about leaving, are you-- Do you, really?”

Dex nodded. He was shaking, from the need to get off and because of the way Sid was looking at him, like he was reading the tea leaves of his own future in Dex’s eyes. 

“Guess I better fuck you extra hard when you get back from Maine, then,” Sid said.

“Also now,” Dex said, nodding. “Please?”

Sid sniffed and leaned in to nose at Dex’s throat as he guided himself into position, then inside. Dex squeaked a little in shock; it had been a while since he’d had anyone, let alone someone this big. He was inclined to be embarrassed about that noise, but didn’t mind that he’d made it when Sid licked over his pounding pulse as if to soothe him in response, still sliding in without pause. Dex had to cup his hand over his mouth and pinch his eyes shut tight, not sure if he was afraid he’d start crying or just bellowing Sid’s name like a lunatic. He still fit in a way that was too much and also perfect.

“Thought you were gonna fuck me extra hard,” Dex said when Sid was all in and peering down at him like he’d forgotten where he was or something. 

“I just want to look at you,” Sid said, narrowing his eyes. He put his hand on Dex’s throat, covering it completely. He didn’t squeeze, just held Dex by the neck like he owned him, like he used to, while studying his face. “You’re a fucking time traveller-- and. I’m fucking you, and. Let me look for a goddamn second, jesus.” 

“Okay,” Dex said, clenching up tight around him. He grinned when Sid groaned. 

Sid didn’t actually start fucking him hard for a full thirty seconds, which was a new record. He was his usual heedless self after that, and Dex was so glad, couldn’t remember the last time someone had really let loose on him. He reached up over his head and grabbed the arm of the couch with one hand, his other hand clawed around Sid’s shoulder while he slammed in and grunted against the side of Dex’s throat. Sid was drooling a little against Dex’s skin, spitting curses and snapping his hips with abandon, fucking into Dex like he knew he could take it.

So you really do know it’s me, Dex thought, eyes closed and face buried in Sid’s sweaty, messy hair. He came between the friction of their bodies and thought he heard Sid whine a little for the feeling of Dex spasming around his dick while Sid kept fucking into him, or maybe he was whining for some other reason. Pretty soon, sooner than Dex would have liked, Sid was coming, too, with his usual death rattle groan, his mouth open and hot on Dex’s neck. 

Dex had hardly ever been the one who fell asleep after they fucked. Usually that had been Sid, worn out from how athletic he suddenly got when his dick was in Dex. This time it was Dex who was drifting off even before Sid had pulled out all the way. Maybe it was an age thing. He felt Sid shifting on the couch and heard him sniffling and cleaning up a little, capping the lube. Dex’s eyelids felt so heavy, and he didn’t object when Sid collapsed back onto him, overheated and reeking of sex, curling himself around Dex’s surrendered body. 

“You gonna tell me what I did?” Sid asked when Dex was so close to sleep that he couldn’t make sense of the question.

“What you did?” 

At the moment Dex couldn’t imagine Sid ever wronging him, because he was naked and Sid was spooning him and he’d forgotten how bad he needed this part, more than anything, even when he’d invented a time travel machine to get it back. 

“Yeah, to-- Make you run away.”

“Oh. It was stupid, it was--”

“No-- Wait. Don’t tell me.”

“Why not?”

Sid tightened his grip on Dex and sighed against his shoulder. 

“Fuck it, man. If however I screw up means you get the fuck out of here and go off and be brilliant without me… Let’s not fuck with that.”

Dex nodded, eyes closed, though he had learned over the years that being brilliant was overrated. He was too tired to explain what had happened, anyway: Sid had slept with Julie to prove he would always win, or that Dex was obviously gay and trying to be ‘normal’ for the sake of his father’s approval, or that breaking Sid’s heart had serious consequences.

Or something.

Dex wiggled back against the familiar shape of Sid’s body. They’d never really passed out this way, with Sid hugged around him from behind. Sid was like a furnace, but Dex didn’t mind the extra heat. He liked the weight of Sid’s arm across his chest, and the way Sid’s hot breath tickled the long hair at the back of his neck. He decided that when he woke up he’d tell Sid about the stupid Julie thing, and how he shouldn’t do it, so that maybe they’d still be together and everything awful in the future wouldn’t be waiting for Dex when he went back.

When he woke up back in his penthouse he wasn’t sure if he’d been dreaming, until he ran, still naked, into the lab and saw the sheet lying on the floor beside the device, which had readings that indicated it had been used to travel to 2002. 

Dex stood there staring at the thing and listening for any sign that Sid had somehow changed his ways because of that visitation, thereby changing the timeline Dex knew. Maybe Sid was in the kitchen making birthday pancakes or some goddamn thing.

There wasn’t a sound. The apartment was empty. Dex went to his bedroom, put on some boxer shorts, and called a private investigator.

It was possible he’d find nothing but a death record, but with the world crumbling anyway, what did he have to lose by trying to find Sid now? 

He was paying top dollar, and within an hour he had his first piece of information from the investigator: not a death record. An address. 

*


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to everyone for the feedback on this story so far, this fic community is really dear to me and it's been the best surprise to realize that others care about these characters as much as I do!
> 
> **

Dex was a reclusive germophobe at the best of times, and leaving his penthouse during a pandemic, amid the grim haze of thick wildfire smoke that permeated the city, had him feeling like his trembly old self again, gripping the wheel of his car for dear life as he pulled out of his building’s parking garage and fully reentered the present hellscape. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken anything that resembled a road trip, and it was possible it had been the day he drove from Milwaukee to L.A. to restart his life in grad school, on a scholarship, the few things he owned packed into the trunk of the old Dodge Neon that he still couldn’t believe his father had let him have as a prize for finally getting the fuck out of his house. 

Now he was making the reverse of that trip, driving across the country and back to the midwest. Sid wasn’t in Milwaukee anymore, according to Dex’s private investigator, but he was nearby, in a Chicago suburb, apparently working as a bouncer at a dumpy strip club. Dex hadn’t even been aware strip clubs were allowed to resume operating in Illinois. He couldn’t begin to picture the sadness of Sid’s life, except that it seemed like the inverse of Dex’s own disappointments. Sid had never had success as a musician and had an arrest record that included two brief stints in jail for what sounded like bar fights that he’d won, but he’d also been married three times and had a long list of ‘associates’ the investigator was able to dig up based on Sid having signed the lease on rented residences with them, a handful of men but mostly women. Sid was single now, last divorced four years prior. 

Dex hoped Sid wasn’t in love with a stripper or something. After revisiting their past, he had to admit that he wanted Sid to be in something like love with him.

It was an unlikely outcome and Dex was prepared to be laughed at or dismissed as crazy for tracking Sid down. But if Dex didn’t have the balls to do this now, at what felt like the end of the world, when would he? And the marriages indicated what Dex had begun to suspect after seeing Sid in the past, after kissing Sid the way he sometimes had when they were young, too rarely: Sid might be some kind of secret romantic. Dex wondered if he still wrote songs about people, or about anything.

He felt slightly better once he crossed the border into Nevada, maybe because he’d made it out of California, which had seemed somewhat impossible as he left his parking garage four hours earlier. Now it was mid-afternoon and he was really getting somewhere, if still just at the start of his long journey. The drive to the address in Illinois that the investigator had given him would take thirty hours. The investigator had also warned Dex that Sid’s residence of record was a rental property, that it was possible Sid had recently moved on, and that he'd have to reach out to his midwest affiliate to get on-the-ground confirmation that Sid was still living at his last known residence.

“This is someone who moves around a lot,” he explained. “If you wait a few days--”

“I don’t have a few days,” Dex said, as if he was dying or something. He just couldn’t wait any longer.

Also, maybe he was a little afraid to confront Sid in the present. Possibly he was only able to make this long drive because there was no guarantee Sid would even be there when he arrived. 

He stopped for the night at a motel in Grand Junction, checking in around midnight. The town was creepy and felt haunted. It was a welcome change from L.A., which was creepy and haunted, too, but in a different way. Grand Junction felt like the hometown of ghosts; L.A. was lately more zombie-like, though maybe Dex didn’t interact with the outside world enough to really make this judgment. He sat cross-legged on a scummy motel room bed and watched an absurd late night cartoon show he couldn’t really follow while eating Doritos from the motel’s vending machine, feeling younger than he had when he left his place that morning, as if he was moving backward through time again. 

By sunrise he was on the road again, having gotten a perfect six hours of sleep. The lumpy motel bed and musty blackout curtains had provided a kind of comfort that his expensive mattress and floor to ceiling views back home couldn’t. He was a little bit giddy as he passed through the winding mountain roads in Colorado, driving faster than he had the day before. His car was a Tesla, a gift from an investor in one of his projects, and he’d barely used it in the two years that he’d owned it. Would Sid call him a west coast douchebag when he saw this car? Definitely, if Sid was really there at the end of this road. Dex was already cautioning himself not to get his hopes up, though he knew it was too late for that by the time he rocketed out of Colorado and through Nebraska cornfields. 

Driving from one end of Nebraska to the other filled him steadily with dread, because once he’d crossed the state he’d be in Iowa, and that would be all that was left between him and Illinois. He’d been driving for fourteen hours by the time he hit Iowa City and had to stop. When he woke in the morning he’d have just three hours of driving left before he reached Sid’s residence, or at least the one he was last on record for renting. 

His motel in Iowa City was less charming than the one in Grand Junction, sterile and characterless. He had phone calls about missed Zoom meetings with his investors the day before. He didn’t even listen to the voicemails they’d left, just stared at the ceiling and dropped in and out of a restless sleep, dreaming over and over that he was waking up in Sid’s basement. Sometimes in these dreams he was in his twenties again, and sometimes he was an old man who’d screwed up his calculations when traveling through time and had aged himself in an irreversible way. Once he was just himself, as he was, with his too-long hair and vintage Star Trek t-shirt. When he’d actually traveled back in time he’d left his clothes in the past and returned naked. In all the dreams he had in Iowa, he was alone in Sid’s basement, dressed, trying to get up the stairs or out the side door but unable to leave for reasons he couldn’t figure out. More distressing than being trapped there was the fact that Sid wasn’t there with him, and he woke from at least one of these dreams gasping in horror after having realized that the turtle in the aquarium on the far wall was actually Sid, who’d been transformed somehow, by aliens or malfunctioning tech. Either way, Dex was left with the impression that it was his fault.

He felt strange and outside of time altogether when he got on the road again in the morning, later than he’d intended to. The strip club where Sid worked was outside Elmhurst, a place called Scores. Sid’s rented apartment of record was about ten minutes away. Illinois was just more farmland at first, which Dex had expected, but the persisting rolling flatlands seemed post-apocalyptic to him while the city was still out of sight, highway road signs promising that he was headed in the right direction. He’d bought coffee at his last stop for gas and his heart was racing, his anxiety peaking as he imagined reaching Lake Michigan and finding the city not where he’d left it, all civilization up to and including Scores Gentlemen’s Club wiped out during his drive through the dreamlike nothingness of the middle of the country. 

He couldn’t see Chicago’s skyscrapers from street level in Elmhurst, but he was pretty sure they were still out there once he was driving past more familiar signs of life, all of which reminded him of growing up just outside Milwaukee: strip malls, traffic, familiar fast food chains. Though he’d read that the smoke from California had reached Washington D.C., there was no sign of it in Elmhurst. The skies overhead were partly cloudy, blue peeking through pale streaks of white. A single airplane was cutting a jetstream path overhead when he parked at the crappy apartment complex where Sid supposedly resided and climbed out of the car on shaky legs. 

Dex leaned against his car and stared up at the two story building. He thought about getting something to eat before he went knocking on Sid’s door. His hands were shaky from the coffee, but his stomach hurt and he had no appetite. What the fuck was he even doing? This now seemed a hundred degrees more insane than using a time machine to more literally visit the past.

The apartment building that was making Dex feel like he’d never actually stopped being a coward had outdoor walkways like the motels he’d stayed in on the way there, with a rusting metal railing that lined the second floor. Sid’s supposed apartment was on the second floor, number 209. Dex had parked in view of it and was staring at the front door, willing it to open, when an old Jeep with a dented rear bumper pulled into the other side of the lot and parked. Dex stayed where he was and watched a man get out of the Jeep. He was a big guy with short dark hair, tall and overweight, wearing an unbuttoned flannel over a black t-shirt and jeans, a pack of cigarettes occupying what looked like a semi-permanent place in his back pocket. Carrying a bag of fast food, he headed up the stairs to the building’s second floor.

He was Sid, Dex realized, even from a distance and with twenty years of weight and stress packed onto him, plus a receding hairline. From twenty feet away, Dex could see Sid still had the same big, tired eyes. His almost-pointed elf ears looked even more obvious with his hair cut so short, and he had a cigarette tucked behind one.

Dex was dropped back into the past again, heart pounding, remembering exactly what it was like to see Sid at school or in the neighborhood and not know if he should approach, or if he even wanted to, because he couldn’t trust Sid to be nice to him. Now this man was both that Sid, that level of scary, and some stranger, too. 

He made himself think about the day he’d accidentally started a small fire in his basement lab. He’d put it out quickly but his dad was livid about the upstairs smoke alarm going off and waking him just an hour after he’d come off shift. He’d called Dex a delusional moron, among other things, and threw him out of the house, literally, so that Dex was a heap of smoke-scented skinny limbs in the alley between his house and Sid’s. 

Sid had been outside smoking and saw the whole thing happen. He seemed unperturbed. They hadn’t even talked much before that, and as Dex collected himself, coughing, he’d expected his mean-looking neighbor to laugh at him. 

“So,” Sid had said, staring at Dex from beneath heavy eyelids. He had melting eyeliner on and looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks, and like he probably had some problems of his own. “You like setting shit on fire, huh?”

“No,” Dex said. With no place else to go, he just stood there waiting to get his ass kicked. Sid looked like the kind of guy who’d do that for fun. 

“Bullshit,” Sid said. He grinned in a lop-sided way that felt like a threat and an invitation at the same time, showing Dex his side tooth gap and pointy canine. “I know a pyro when I see one.” 

Dex had never felt like he might be secretly cool before that moment. Fuck it, he thought, giving Sid a shaky, nervous smile back. Maybe he did like setting shit on fire. 

Sid invited him to cause trouble with him that night. He was still wired after a show that had gone poorly and was looking for something to wreck. Dex went along with him because he’d been locked out of his house and he had nowhere else to go, and because he felt like breaking things, too. People looked twice when they saw him at Sid’s side, but nobody asked him what he was doing there, because Sid didn’t entertain questions like that. Dex had never really felt like he belonged anywhere, before Sid. 

Now it was twenty-some years later and he was watching Sid unlock his apartment door, trying to make himself do what Sid had done for him that day. Sid could have walked off, ignored Dex, said nothing. He didn’t have to pick Dex up by his shirt collar and drag him away from that moment. He didn’t have to save the part of Dex that had survived a lot of long, lonely days to bring him to that moment, and now to this one.

“Sid!”

Dex’s voice sounded too squeaky and unsure, shouted across the parking lot, but it did the trick. Sid turned from his apartment’s unlocked front door and frowned in Dex’s direction.

Dex waved, feeling like an idiot. He was smiling, too, unable to stop as soon as Sid’s eyes met his.

There was a terrifying half-second when Dex wasn’t sure if Sid recognized him. Then Sid’s brow creased, his mouth quirked, and his barrel-shaped chest bounced with what looked like a dry laugh. 

“Oi!” Sid shouted, in that fucking fake accent. “S’that who I think it is?”

“Probably!” Dex said, beaming.   
  
“What the hell are you doing here, mate?”

“I don’t really know! Hi!” 

Sid shook his head. He was still frowning, also grinning. He looked down at his beer gut as if just remembering it was there, then back up at Dex. 

“Are you here to tell me the world needs saving and I’m the only washed-up prick for the job?” Sid asked, dropping the accent. 

Yes, Dex thought, his eyes blurring over. He blinked rapidly and shook his head, shrugged his shoulders. 

“C’mere,” Sid said when Dex said nothing, afraid his voice would break. “Let me get a fuckin’ look at you, jesus.” 

This was a good enough invitation to get Dex sprinting in Sid’s direction, shameless. He had to swallow down some crazed laughter as he vaulted up the stairs to the second floor walkway, and he made himself slow down once he’d gotten there. He was a little breathless, not out of shape but overstimulated, also possibly over-caffeinated. He could see the ends of his hair trembling before he pushed them out of his face. 

“Holy shit,” Sid said when Dex came to stand in front of him, an agitated mess of nerves and audible breath. Sid looked him over and frowned in a way that made Dex sure he must have remembered some snatches of his encounter with Dex at this age in the past. “You in some kind of trouble, dork?”

The ‘dork’ was the softest endearment Dex had heard anyone call him in years, maybe ever.

“No,” Dex said. His voice was a mess. He bit the inside of his cheek and told himself to pull it the fuck together. “I just. Wondered whatever became of you.” 

Sid snorted and looked down at himself, at the open apartment door, then back Dex.

“Well, here it fuckin’ is. Bet you’re pretty impressed.”

“Sid--”

“That’s your car?” Sid asked, gesturing in the Tesla’s direction with his fast food bag. “What the fuck even is that? Did you invent that thing?”

“No. It’s just-- Who cares about the stupid car? The city I live in is, like. Burning down. I wanted to leave, and. This was where I wanted to go, so.” 

Dex made himself stop talking. Whatever Sid had in that greasy Chicken Shack bag smelled amazing, in a nasty way, like Sid’s basement once had. 

“How’d you find me?” Sid asked. 

“I’m rich,” Dex said, because that ultimately explained it.

Sid snorted and shook his head. 

“Come inside,” he said, tipping his head toward the apartment door. “You’re wearing a fucking Star Trek shirt, really?”

“I-- Yeah--”

Dex followed Sid into the apartment, which was dark until Sid flipped a light switch, illuminating a small but surprisingly clean room with a couch and a chipped wooden coffee table, a flatscreen TV mounted on the wall. 

“Do you live with anybody?” Dex asked, lingering in the foyer as he watched Sid walk into the tiny kitchen that opened into the main room, where he flicked on another light and put the fast food bag on the counter. 

“No,” Sid said. “Why do you ask?”

“Because the carpet looks vacuumed.” 

“Still a smart ass, huh?” Sid turned from the fridge to give Dex a humorless stare. “Disappointed that I’m not even more of a fuck up than you expected?”

“No! Jesus, you’re. Ah.”

Dex pressed his lips together. Whatever else was going on in his life, Sid actually looked really good. He carried the extra weight well and the grey over his ears was kinda hot. 

“I’m only disappointed that you still smoke,” Dex said. “It’s. So bad for you.”

“Same old dork.” Sid grinned after saying so and took the cigarette from behind his ear. “I’m trying to quit this shit, actually,” he said, digging the pack from his back pocket. “See, I stick one behind my ear on the drive home from my second shift, and if I make it all the way into the apartment without lighting up, I get to have an extra after work beer. It’s working so far. Mostly.” 

Sid put the cigarette back into its pack and tossed it on the counter. He got two beers out of the fridge and held one up to offer it to Dex.

“Why not,” Dex said. “Just-- It’s, like, half past noon--?”

“I work nights. This is my post-work celebratory period. I’ll be asleep in two hours, so. Hope you weren’t hoping I’d show you the town.” 

“I’m not-- Hoping anything,” Dex muttered, lying. 

He accepted the beer when Sid walked it over to him, surprised Sid didn’t just throw it across the room and overcome by the post-work smell of him, which wasn’t so different from his post-show smell, back in the day: sweat and smoke and the kind of alive-by-night life Dex had only ever known vicariously, through him. 

“Good,” Sid said, lingering close and looming over Dex. His eyelids got so heavy when he looked down on Dex like this, like he was thinking about what he wanted from him and how easy it would be to get it. “‘Cause there’s nothing in Elmhurst worth seeing.”

Dex grunted in meek disagreement. Sid was here, and Dex couldn’t stop staring up at him in probably obvious awe. He made himself look away and cracked open the beer can Sid had given him. 

“To the good old days,” Sid said, toasting Dex’s can after he’d opened his own. 

“I don’t know that I’d call them that,” Dex said. “But, um. To the past.”

He watched Sid’s eyes as they both drank. Sid watched him right back. Were they going to talk about the day Dex showed up looking like this and Sid fucked him in the basement just like he always had, like it was no big deal? Or did Dex hallucinate that after all? 

“Sorry, mate,” Sid said, halfway back to the accent. He looked lost for a moment, then his sharky mask of confidence returned. “I gotta sit down, been on my feet for six hours and then in my fucking car for four. Can’t decide which is worse on the old back. C’mere.” 

Sid went to the sofa and sat on the far end, which seemed to suggest that Dex should leave plenty of room between them. He perched on the other end and sipped from his beer, though he really needed food, not booze. Sid had brought the Chicken Shack bag over with him and it was sitting on the coffee table, still smelling good. 

“You were in the car for four hours?” Dex said. “Me too, almost. I drove from Iowa this morning.”

“That so? I was driving shitheads to and from O’Hare, mostly.”

“You-- Drive a taxi?” 

“Uber.” 

“That’s cool.” 

Sid gave him a look. He was still kind of scary, but being fixed with his angry stare almost made Dex grin now, and he felt goosebumps racing down over his arms.

“It’s not cool,” Sid said. “It’s shit. And my other job is worse. Have you ever seen a stripper in a face mask? Fuckin’ spooky. Shit feels like the end of days lately, you know?”

“Yes. I live in L.A. It’s, like, on fire.”

Sid rolled his eyes like this was dramatic. Maybe it was, a little, but barely.

“Yeah, so you said.” He sat forward with a grunt and opened the fast food bag. “You hungry?”

“I’m fucking starving,” Dex said, watching him pull out a sandwich wrapped in silver foil and a carton of fries.

“Get over here, then,” Sid said, tilting his head to invite Dex closer. “Have some. Fuck knows my fat ass doesn’t need to finish it all myself.” 

“You’re not-- I mean. You look good, actually.” 

Sid gave Dex that look again, more mildly this time. Dex just stared back at him, stone-faced, daring him to pretend not to know Dex would always find him hot. 

“You’re not doing so bad yourself,” Sid said, staring back. “That’s a real Snake Plissken look you got going on there. Never thought you had it in you. All you need is an eye patch.”

“Offering to put out my eye?”

“Jesus,” Sid muttered, unwrapping the sandwich. As if it was news to him that Dex could be dark, too.

Dex snickered. Even at the most prestigious science conferences where he’d been invited to give keynote lectures, he’d never felt as flattered as he was by that comparison to Snake. They used to watch _Escape from New York_ together in Sid’s basement, sometimes after fucking, while Sid chain smoked and recited all his favorite lines as Kurt Russell said them onscreen, Dex curled up at Sid’s side and muttering the same lines along with him, eventually. 

Again, Dex resisted the urge to ask Sid if he remembered seeing him like this before, that day he showed up in the alley with a beard and offered to blow Sid. He wasn’t sure why he was afraid to bring it up. He supposed there was a small chance discussing it could set off some kind of universe-destroying time paradox, and he stuffed french fries in his mouth instead of talking about anything at all, eating like a ravenous refugee of the post-apocalypse who’d just happened upon his first real meal in months. 

“I read about you online,” Sid said after he’d finished his beer and a little less than half of the sandwich, passing the rest over to Dex. 

“Yeah?” Dex said, with his mouth full. 

“Guess you got everything you ever wanted.”

Dex snorted and swallowed, then grabbed for his beer and took a few gulps.

“Uh, no,” he said, looking over at Sid, still breathless from guzzling his drink. 

“Yeah, seems like you’re really suffering, you Tesla driving fuck.”

“So you do recognize my car.”

“I’m not completely stupid. Just didn’t want to give you the satisfaction. I guess you’re here because you had some kind of Scrooge McDuck epiphany, huh?”

“What the _fuck_ are you talking about?” Dex asked, and then he was laughing hard, feeling kind of drunk and giddy. 

“Scrooge-- You know! A Christmas Carol, the rich guy, he travels through time because he realizes his life actually sucks, or whatever.”

Sid stopped there and gave Dex an uncertain look. It was possible he’d thought that old Dex visiting him in his twenties was a drug or booze-induced hallucination and that he was nervous about treating it as something that had actually happened now that old Dex was with him for real.

“That was Ebenezer Scrooge,” Dex said. “Not Scrooge McDuck.”

“I know that, you fuckin’ nerd! That was the joke.” 

Dex laughed again, and made himself stop when he realized he was giggling like an idiot, or a kid. His face was hot, and it got hotter when Sid leaned back and stretched his arms out along the back of the couch, spreading his legs in a maybe incidental way and staring at Dex. Sid’s apartment smelled almost alarmingly good, much better than that old basement had, and Dex had loved the stale sex and cigarette smoke scent of that place. This apartment didn’t have the tobacco reek; maybe Sid only smoked outside, or in his car, when he allowed himself a post-work treat. The smell in the room, or maybe from Sid himself, was sort of spicy, something like cinnamon but not quite so sweet. 

“What do you want from me, anyway?” Sid asked, looking like he felt a little cornered, in a way he hadn’t when Dex showed up from the future and announced he’d invented time travel. 

Dex tried not to be hurt by the question. He wiped his hands on a fast food napkin and finished his beer. 

“I wanted you to be alive, mostly,” Dex said. “I didn’t think that far beyond making sure you were.” 

“Are you having a midlife crisis? Is that what this hair situation is about?”

“I did just turn forty the other day.” Dex sat up straighter and pushed his hair back off his forehead, then smoothed it down in back. “You don’t like my hair?”

“It’s--” Sid made a face. “Are you kidding? I’m over here jealous as fuck. Look at mine. Barely hanging on.”

“Oh, god, it’s not that bad. It’s good, actually, that-- Messy, um. Look.”

Sid grinned slowly. Dex knew that grin and that it meant he was in trouble. He didn’t mind, never really had. They were sitting closer since Dex had moved over to share the food, and all he’d have to do was reach over and touch Sid’s knee, and then-- What? Would they tear each other’s clothes off like animals, like the good old days?

“You really showed up at my doorstep to ask me if I like your hair,” Sid said, and he laughed under his breath at the look Dex gave him. “Or maybe you really want something else.” 

“Is this familiar to you at all?” Dex asked, gesturing at his forty-year-old face. “Ringing any bells? Me looking like this?”

“If this is just part of some time travel experiment I’m gonna be real annoyed.”

“It’s not-- I mean, well--”

“‘Cause I’m no stranger to paid scientific trials, and you better have a fat paycheck for me if I’m part of one here, against my will.” 

“Or what? You’ll sue me?”

Sid glowered. Dex felt pissed off, too, though he knew it wasn’t fair. He could ask to suck Sid’s dick, but in his personal timeline he’d just done that, and while it was enjoyable it hadn’t gotten him what he’d traveled all that way for, back through time. 

“It’s not an experiment,” Dex said. “I missed you.” 

“Why?”

Dex sputtered a kind of laugh, but Sid didn’t crack a smile. He looked serious, angry. 

“Why?” Dex said, practically shouting it back at him. “Why do you think? You just told me you’re not actually stupid. There’s no way you missed how I felt about you back then.” 

Sid leaned forward and looked at Dex like he was crazy. It was an unfortunately attractive look on him, same as ever.

“You liked riding my dick,” Sid said. “And getting out of your dad’s house. And as soon as some doe-eyed chick gave you the time of day, you were done with even the dick.”

“What!” Dex hopped to his feet, feeling cartoonish but unable to help it. “You acted like I was lucky you were giving me the time of day! Julie was nice to me, she was-- And you know I wanted to be-- Something I wasn’t, or just-- Not your little twink BDSM boyfriend!” 

“Man, whatever!” Sid said, and he got to his feet, too, crushing his empty beer can between his hands like a reflex. “I knew you had to get out of there, and I had this dream or something, or maybe not a dream, that you told me I’d pissed you off bad enough to send you running, finally. So I did what I had to. Now you’re a big fuckin’ success who came here to rub it in my face--”

“I did not-- I’m not-- Wait.” Dex closed his eyes and held up his hands. “You-- You slept with Julie to get me to leave? Because I told you, came back and told you, because I--”

“I woulda done it anyway,” Sid said. He pitched the empty beer can away and curled his hands into fists, eyes blazing. “I’d have done it just to prove the whole thing with you and her was a joke. But if getting you to finally bolt the hell out of there was a bonus, sure. Maybe I also had that in mind.” 

Dex was close to hyperventilating, trying to process the implications of what Sid was telling him. He had to sit down, and abruptly he was, his legs giving out as he fell to a seat on the sofa again, his head spinning.

“Hey,” Sid said, most of the venom leaked out of his voice. “Forget it, man, it’s all-- Ha, in the past. You need some water or something? You okay?”

“I--” Dex said, but his voice choked off. He put his head between his knees and tried to breathe. 

“Why do you always have to be such a dramatic lunatic about everything?” Sid asked, but he also sat beside Dex, close, and put his hand on Dex’s trembling back. “Gonna puke?” he asked, his mouth close to Dex’s ear. 

Dex made a whimpery noise and took two handfuls of his hair, pulling. Sid sighed. He rubbed Dex’s back, then wrapped his big hands around Dex’s small ones and eased his tense fingers apart until he wasn’t yanking on his hair anymore.

“Knock it off,” Sid said. “You’ll wreck your pretty boy hair.” 

Dex leaned over, slowly, until he was draped across Sid’s lap, clutching at Sid’s knee. He kept his head down and his face hidden in his arms, like he could pretend he didn’t know what he was doing. 

“You’re always so hot,” Dex muttered, meaning Sid’s skin, which was warm enough to feel like a furnace through his jeans. 

“Huh?” Sid said. He was rubbing Dex’s back again, probably annoyed that he had to deal with this freak’s meltdown when he should be unwinding after work. 

“Nothing,” Dex said. “I’ll go.”

But he didn’t move, and Sid wrapped one heavy arm around Dex’s back, holding him in place like he wanted him there. 

“You’re still a fuckin’ mess,” Sid said, running his fingers through Dex’s hair after they’d been like that for a while. “That’s a relief. Thought you’d be, like. Telling nasty stories about the loser you used to fuck back in flyover country. Cringing about it with your hotshot friends.”

“I don’t have any friends.”

“Jesus, well. Me either. I can’t really do the long term thing with people. They just piss me the fuck off.”

Dex made a soft noise against Sid’s leg rather than admitting that people just took advantage of him. Though maybe it was more like he didn’t give them the chance to. 

“I’m sorry,” Dex said, sitting up abruptly when he started to feel deeply embarrassed about how he was behaving, the buzz of the mid-afternoon beer beginning to wear off. He blinked at Sid, who was giving a kind of soft, open look that maybe just meant he was exhausted. “I’ll get out of your hair,” Dex said, trying to stand.

Sid grabbed for him and yanked him back down, held him in place. 

“Wait,” he said, staring into Dex’s eyes. Their faces were close. Sid’s breath smelled like ketchup and beer. It was weirdly intoxicating, like everything about him. “Tell me something, scientist man,” Sid said, grabbing Dex’s chin so he wouldn’t look away. “Are you here because the world’s ending for real? Am I your ‘fuck it’? Your worst case scenario?” 

“No,” Dex said, not even sure which question he was answering. Then he realized what Sid was really asking. “But. If the world really was ending, I mean, if I knew for sure-- Yeah, I’d want to be with you. You fucking asshole.”

Dex’s voice wobbled on those last two words, because ‘fucking asshole’ was an endearment in this case, and Sid would know that, would hear it. At least Dex hoped he would. Apparently they’d both misunderstood each other a lot back in the old days.

Sid flashed his sharky grin in Dex’s face, but there wasn’t anything mean in it. He sighed like he’d never been more tired, rested his forehead against Dex’s and brought his hand up to the collar of Dex’s t-shirt. When they were young Sid had a habit of hooking his fingers into the front of Dex’s shirts and tugging, yanking Dex up onto his tiptoes and getting in his face, ostensibly to intimidate him. Only now, watching him do it again, did Dex realize he’d always been angling for a kiss. 

“I was a dumb kid,” Dex said. His voice was barely working. “Please don’t hold it against me.”

“Fuck off,” Sid said, his lips so close that they brushed against Dex’s, making him shiver. “You were always the smartest kid I knew.” 

Dex closed his eyes, parted his lips and exhaled for what felt like the first time since he’d left the burning world behind when Sid’s tongue pressed into his mouth, fast food-flavored. Dex grabbed for Sid in a way he’d always been too timid to try when they were younger, holding him close. The fact that Sid was even bigger now felt like the greatest gift, like proof that Dex deserved good things after all. 

“I know you probably came here to be ravaged by my monster dick,” Sid said when they were reclining against the couch together, kissing like they had all the time in the world and pawing at each other’s hair. 

Dex snorted and wrinkled his nose, though of course he had, in part. 

“But I’m seriously dead on my feet after work,” Sid said, stroking his fingers through Dex’s hair. He couldn’t seem to stop touching it, and Dex felt the same, rubbing his fingertips over the short grey hairs above Sid’s ears. “I gotta sleep first, mate,” Sid said. “Don’t want to give you a substandard fuck after you drove all this way.” 

“Bad timing is my brand,” Dex said, and he tried not to laugh at his own bad joke. “Just kidding, um. I could use a nap myself. I drove thirty hours to get here, over the past two days.” 

“Fuck, really? That’s hot.” 

Dex snickered and shook his head but didn’t disagree, just let Sid kiss him until he seemed like he was falling asleep in mid-lick. 

“Where’s your guitar?” Dex asked when Sid let him by the hand to the small bedroom at the back of the apartment, where Dex was heartened to see a framed _Escape from New York_ poster on the wall behind the bed, and a big aquarium in the corner with a single turtle swimming around. 

“Guitar’s in the closet,” Sid said. He gave Dex a warning look, like it was a sensitive subject. 

Dex just shrugged and toed off his shoes before flopping onto Sid’s bed. He was glad the guitar was at least still in residence. He rolled onto his side, closed his eyes, and curled in on himself with beaming satisfaction when Sid climbed into bed behind him and wrapped around him, tucking him in against his chest.

“I always loved this,” Dex admitted, finally. Because they might wake up to the end of the world. It could happen any time. 

“This,” Sid muttered, his mouth moving on Dex’s throat. He was taunting Dex a little, maybe for not describing what he’d loved more directly: being held, being close to you, feeling like you wanted to keep me safe in your arms for as long as you could. 

Dex didn’t say any of that, but he did roll over and bury his face in Sid’s warm, soft chest. Sid smelled so good, it was like being dropped into a vat of the hardest drugs. Dex was out like a light before he was ready to stop reveling in how euphoric the experience was. 

They woke up not to the apocalypse but to a late summer rainstorm blasting against the bedroom’s only window. Dex was so tangled up in Sid that their transition from cuddling to fucking was calmer than he’d ever known it to be: they were doing one and then just as easily the other, still sleepy and laughing at each other’s clumsy moves.

Dex drifted off after sex, clinging. He felt Sid leave the bed and whined under his breath but couldn’t fight his eyelids open wide enough to otherwise object. He felt like he hadn’t slept for real, like this, in years. Sid’s bedsheets smelled incredible, especially now that they’d fucked on them. 

“I really want a smoke,” Sid said when he slipped back into bed. 

“No,” Dex said, because if there was one thing left in the world worth saving, it was him. Dex would dedicate his life to it if he had to, if Sid would let him. 

“I’m not gonna smoke in bed, dork, so save your breath. But-- Here. Here’s the other worst thing I do.”

Dex opened his eyes and tipped his head back, grinning when he saw Sid had his guitar. He’d also put a t-shirt on, and boxers. Dex was still naked and twisted up in the sheets, groping for him.

“Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em ‘cause it’s going downnn,” Sid sang, in his jokey British accent, picking out familiar notes on the guitar.

Dex remembered this song. He crawled upward to put his chin on Sid’s shoulder and slid his arm across Sid’s chest, wishing Sid had left his shirt off so Dex could rub his fingers through his chest hair. Dex was hungry again. The rain was still blowing against the bedroom window in wind-delivered smacks. Somewhere on the floor, in Dex’s jeans, his phone was blowing up with calls from investors who wanted him to sit quietly on video calls while they told him why he should sell out for increasingly large sums, to increasingly obfuscated powers. 

“I’m not proud of this,” Dex said when Sid stopped playing and looked over at him as if for approval. “But I’m extremely wealthy.” 

“Oh.” Sid looked down at the guitar and nodded, moving his fingers over the strings without plucking them. “I don’t know how to break it to you, baby, but I’m not.”

“Shut up.” Dex kissed Sid’s cheek, then rubbed his face against Sid’s stubble, which might technically be considered nuzzling. “I’m considering, like, fighting evil,” Dex said, sitting back to show Sid he was serious, maybe. “Like we did when we were kids. I could use your help.” 

“Uhh,” Sid said. “Sure?”

“In the meantime, we can go anywhere. Well, pending current international restrictions. Eventually, though! Maybe. We could go anywhere you want.” 

Dex stared at Sid and let that sink in. As he did, he realized he didn’t want to be anywhere else, maybe ever. Sid’s apartment felt like some kind of paradise at the end of his personal rainbow. He chewed his lip and wondered if he should apologize for grandstanding.

“You’re cute,” Sid said, and he grinned like he meant it. “Where’d you park your time machine?”

“It’s back home, but I really don’t want to use it again. Sid! Don’t ask me for that, please, okay? Anything but that.”

“How come, dork?”

“Because-- And I know this is fucked up, and selfish, but, ah! I don’t want to mess with a good thing. I’m scared, okay? I like where I am now.” 

“Now?”

“Like, literally. Where I am now, here. In your bed.”

Sid grinned and played something else on his guitar that Dex recognized, one of his old songs. It was called ‘Mad Scientist Sex Freak.’ Dex had always hoped it was about him. Sid didn’t sing the words, but Dex remembered his favorite part: _He says he’s a genius, I say he’s fucked in the head, he takes it like a comp-li-ment, takes it like he takes my cock--_

“So stay here,” Sid said, looking down at his fingers on the strings. “Been waiting a long time for you to live in my bed.”

Dex nodded and pressed his face to Sid’s neck, breathing in the post-sex scent of him. It was familiar, also a little bit new. Like anything, Dex thought, squeezing himself even more tightly against Sid’s side. Time and space tended to overlap that way. It could be disorienting, but Dex felt like his compass was pointed in the right direction again. He’d sail over a waterfall to stay on this course, as long as he had Sid at his side, looking right into the face of whatever came for them next, until Sid turned toward Dex and gave him that dark grin like he always had, asking if he was ready for this, if he could handle it. Knowing Dex would always say yes.

“Remember when you taught me how to eat ass?” Sid asked.

Dex laughed, his face still pressed against Sid’s skin, flushed now. 

“Yes,” he muttered. “Oh my god. What would the International Association of Laser Science think if they knew I used my most innovative, closely guarded technology to go back in time and teach my boyfriend how to eat my ass?” 

“I don’t know about those fuckers, but I think it’s pretty punk. Maybe the coolest thing my dweeb boyfriend has ever done.”

They pretended it wasn’t a big deal to finally refer to each other as boyfriends, in their forties and after crossing space and time to fix their shit, but when Dex lifted his head he could see Sid was feeling it, too. They locked eyes, grinning, then looked away like embarrassed kids, because obviously it was somehow the biggest deal in the whole fucking world.

**  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Listen I could do a whole fucking soundtrack for this story but here's a theme song in the meantime:
> 
> [If You Leave by OMD](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ylhdfLlhsc)
> 
> <3 <3


End file.
